While the digital currency experts ponder what its all means, CNBC has a great story on the mining - or production - of bitcoins, and how it's become an industry dominated by enterprises harnessing high-tech computing power to profit handsomely:

The meteoric rise in price has not only attracted bitcoin buyers, but also resulted in a surge of interest in digital currency mining. Mining bitcoin requires high computing power to solve a complex mathematical equation, proving that an anonymous miner used the process the network agreed upon to build the blockchain record of transactions. Miners then get bitcoin in reward for successfully completing the equation.

Miners used to be able to use ordinary video graphics cards to process the computations profitably. But in 2013, a Chinese-based company sold the first application-specific integrated circuits, or asic, computer chip cards that mined bitcoin 50 times faster than traditional video graphics cards.

Today, those specialized mining sets can cost anywhere from a few hundred to more than $1,000. It's often also more cost-effective for miners to join mining pools and collaborate on solving the equation, often for a small fee.

Back in the world of fiat currencies, Bloomberg Businessweek has a great story looking at the enormous challenge confronting China as its seeks to rein in $29 trillion of debt and maintain growth in the world's second largest economy. Here's a little glimpse:

Chinese executives were riding an historic credit expansion that the country’s financial authorities turned on after the global financial crisis—and never really turned off. Overall government, household, and corporate debt clocks in at more than $28.8 trillion, or 258 percent of gross domestic product. The biggest share, some $17 trillion, is concentrated on corporate balance sheets, particularly those of lumbering state-owned enterprises producing everything from steel to coal, construction companies, and property developers.

The longer China’s credit binge continues, the greater the risk of a wrenching downturn. At some point the country will no longer be able to both roll over existing debt and fund new projects. If China can’t reduce its reliance on debt, an International Monetary Fund working paper sees growth slowing from the 6.9 percent in the first half of 2017, to 5 percent by 2021. Growth could fall below 3 percent if the country experiences a financial crisis. The impact would ripple across the global economy, which last year got about a third of its expansion from China, according to Nomura Holdings Inc.

The South China Morning Post has an interesting story on the rise of e-Sports in China and the big crowds drawn to watching teams compete in games like League of Legends:

China’s growing e-sports industry – where professional gamers compete against other teams as spectators watch – has seen the number of professional players grow from a mere 50 in 2006, to 1,001 in 2016, according to data from Unibet.

Almost all of EDG’s eight members are below the age of 25. According to Esportsearnings.com, a site that tracks prize money, e-sports players aged between 19 and 24 tend to win the most prize money, while winnings tend to drop off significantly for those over-25.

EDG’s youngest player Tian “Meiko” Ye just turned 19 this year, and is the group’s youngest member. His parents were initially resistant towards his choice to become an e-sports professional.

“After they’ve seen what EDG has achieved, they’re much more supportive now of my profession in e-sports,” Tian said.

The big news overnight was the split - or &quot;fork&quot; - of Bitcoin into two forms of the digital currency, with the schism between rival factions over the future of the most popular crypto-currency leading prices to tumble around 5%.

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